OT: Fifty Years Ago: The Great and Bountiful Movie Year of 1973 - Psycho (1960) Discussion

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

There are some other "great movie years" in movie history; I suppose a case could be made for any year.

But in 1972, The Godfather dominated the year, and in 1975, Jaws dominated the year, and in 1977 Star Wars dominated the year. 1973 had room for two BLOCKBUSTERS(The Exorcist and The Sting -- couldn't be more different) and a flowing faucet of movies to watch that were all pretty interesting in different ways. One could pick favorites "alongside other favorites."

Over the years, Charley Varrick has emerged as the movie I most like re-watching from 1973, but I keep American Graffiti at Number One for the year because -- it is the one movie out of all the movies I've seen in my life that literally CHANGED the course of my life and...I don't really say why anymore. Its a very personal memory from a very "dramatic" year in my young life.

I took American Graffiti very personally at the time, and yet it stands as the "launch of George Lucas"(after the misfire that was THX 1138) was produced by Godfather Francis Coppola and launched a bunch of stars and one TV series(Happy Days with American Graffiti star Ron Howard...who became a mogul himself.)

---

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

I wracked my mind for a 1973 Psycho memory -- and I found it. And it is a funny one.

In 1973 on a visit to Washington DC, I watched Psycho on a local TV station there. It just "turned up." And boy was it CUT:

Shower scene: only about two stabs and over. Arbogast climbing the stairs and...cut to COMMERCIAL. His entire murder was removed. And when Lila found mother in the basement and Mother's head turned towards us -- they cut the shot of Mother OUT. We saw Lila screaming...but not at WHAT. (This happened a lot when movies were edited for broadcast in the 60s and 70s -- vital information that was "not fit for TV" was simply REMOVED and you had to GUESS what people were looking at. I swear, these were the most bizarre versions of movies I ever saw in my life. When Paul Newman killed Gromek on NBC, you couldn't see the actual MEANS of death -- they kept CUTTING out -- the knife, the shovel, and what happened with the oven. Frenzy? The 1975 ABC debut: Rusk didn't rape Brenda; he just threw her on the chair and on Brenda's scream of "My God, the tie!" -- freeze frame. The entire strangling was removed.

Frenzy was a 1972 release, but it went out again in 1973 on a "Universal double bill" with Clint Eastwood's May-December love story "Breezy." I suppose the link was a title that ended in "zy." Or maybe Eastwood as a director here(not the star) with a Hitchcock-like cameo.

And now a shift:

Bookstore browsing the other day, I noticed two "making of" books about two movies of 1973: The Exorcist and The Way We Were.

I can't believe that the book on The Exorcist is the first one on that movie, but this was evidently a 50th Anniversary book. I did not buy it, but I might someday (or, Christmas is coming.)

I bought the book on The Way We Were.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Because in that wonderful start-to-finish movie year of 1973, The Way We Were was one of the best experiences...a true EMOTIONAL rush (not all that far removed from the impact of American Graffiti on my raw young FEELINGS that year) even as it has a reputation as "almost a bad movie" -- not terribly well reviewed, and at times clumsy and hard to watch in its use of Barbra Streisand and her hard-punching screen persona.

Pauline Kael gave the movie a famous review that was often quoted by its director, Sydney Pollack: "A leaky ship full of holes that somehow makes it safely into port...because of the chemistry of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford."

Yep. That's it. In the movie year that Redford rekindled his "bromance" with Paul Newman (in The Sting at December), he also had an honest-to-goodness romance with a FEMALE superstar(Streisand in The Way We Were in October.)

It was a weird year for Robert Redford. He proved himself as a full superstar -- but only in the company of other stars.

I love The Way We Were for its emotion, to be sure. Its got a wall to wall theme song that Kael hated but the Academy awarded as Best Song. (Its composer, Marvin Hamlisch, did great at the 1973 Oscars -- his scores for The Way We Were and The Sting BOTH won Oscars, as did that song.) I love that song , too. And in late 1973 and early 1974, the song was all over the car radios of America...a big hit. Indeed, "movie music" dominated those months as The Way We Were, The Sting, and The Exorcist ALL scored theme music as pop hits(instrumentals in the case of The Sting's ragtime theme and the scary Tubular Bells from Exorcist.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Though The Way We Were(TWWW) is famous for Barbra Streisand's emoting(she was Oscar nommed, and some thought she was robbed by Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class) I REALLY love the movie for Robert Redford in it.

All the women went nuts for that guy, and us straight guys well -- you just like to have that cool, intelligent idealized version of yourself up on the screen, right? Cary Grant was the same way -- far more handsome than any of us could hope to be but somehow -- we could relate to how he comported himself(as in North by Northwest.)

Robert Redford gave me my life's guide to politics when his character, "Hubbell" has this exchange with Streisand:

Streisand: You think politics is funny?
Redford: Well, yeah. You make fun of politicians...what else can you do with them?

Read about the top of our crop in America right now....that's it.

Indeed, the entire movie is about the deep love and basic incompatibility of Hubbell and "Katie"(Streisand). She's a fiery, radical leftist (with Communist roots; the story stretches from college in the 30s to work in the 50s). He's not a Republican(Redford would never play that)...he's simply cynical and uncommitted. Some thought this made his character weak. I think it made his character quite cool. And the poor guy just can't keep up with Streisand and ...they break up. (spoiler? I dunno.)

The great scene in the movie -- accompanied by that great, sad title tune in instrumental and then sung by Streisand over the credits -- is when the two meet by chance years after their divorce(in front of the Plaza Hotel where Roger Thornhill was kidnapped) and we "feel their pain" -- deep love that didn't make it, "the one that got away," pain for the rest of their lives but better to have loved than lost.

It was a tear jerker ending based NOT on death(ala Love Story) but...the reality of failed love and divorce.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

This new book gets into the kind of great detail that Rebello's "Making of Psycho" book got. Its quite a great read with things I read before but all sorts of new detail about EXACTLY what happens when two superstars agree to do a project together and...they are corporations as much as people, with "teams" and strong protection of their brand.

The "making of story" is launched by a personal grail. Streisand had her producer-"owner" Ray Stark buy the rights to The Way We Were. It was to be her movie -- she needed that blond actor to play the impossible dream: Hubbell.

Streisand wanted Redford, and she wanted him bad, and he kept saying no -- for months -- as an impatient Ray Star tried to find a different Hubbell and -- finally -- Redford said yes.

And then the REAL trouble began.

The key to getting Redford was to sign his favorite director and personal pal -- Sydney Pollack -- as the director. Only with Pollock on board could Streisand even HOPE to get Redford. And it was Pollock who put the pressure on his pal "Bob." And got mainly nos. Til he got "yes." Its fascinating how Redford said "OK, OK, OK...I'll DO the damn movie" and then -- in agreeing to it ...made the usual star demands.

For instance, Streisand got top billing ("Streisand and Redford together!") but Redford got paid $200,000 more than Streisand , in trade(her: one million; him: one million two.)

Its interesting the "alternate Hubbells" on deck if Redford passed. Candidate Number One was Ryan O'Neal, a major star who had both Love Story AND a hit with Streisand(What's Up Doc) on his resume. It would have been a repeat of What's Up Doc -- deflating the novelty of the love story. Years later O'Neal played a scene opposite Redford in the all-star "A Bridge Too Far" -- and Redford literally blew O'Neal off the screen.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Two lesser lights were considered -- Ken Howard(currently playing Thomas Jefferson in the movie of 1776 the musical) and Dennis Cole(a TV cop on "Felony Squad.") Lest you think these "nobodies" might not have made it, consider: Streisand's male lead for Up the Sandbox was David Selby(made before TWWW) and for For Pete's Sake(made after TWWW) was Michael Sarrazin.

I suppose that Streisand used those lesser actors to maintain her stardom and her pay, but the truth of the matter is that one reason I liked Barbra Streisand movies is that she often picked really fun male co-stars: Walter Matthau(Hello, Dolly) -- even though they hated each other; George Segal(The Owl and the Pussycat); James Caan(Funny Lady).

But none of those guys hit the heights that Redford hit with her.

Warren Beatty led Streisand along for awhile that he might play Hubbell. Two reasons: he wanted Streisand to perform at a fundraiser for Presidential candidate George McGovern and he liked to say "Robert Redford played a role I turned down."(He said that about the Sundance Kid.) Streisand performed at the political concert ...and Beatty said no.

There are present-day interviews in the book with Streisand and Redford, which make the book fine reading about superstar thought processes. Co-star James Woods offers his usual sarcastic remarks. (Streisand asked him before they played their first scene -- "Are you afraid of me?" -- he might have gotten fired if he said yes, but he swears he said no.) Sidebar: I've read that Steve McQueen also challenged his one-scene co-star Dabney Coleman on "The Towering Inferno." In both cases, the superstar was saying "you are about to act with me and I'm the best of the best. Can you keep up?"

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

The making of the movie was rather hilarious because as the Streisand/Stark camp battled the Redford/Pollock camp, about half of a movie was filmed that was CUT. There are about 20 scenes(mainly about the Hollywood blacklist) that didn't make it and the entire reason for the marriage breaking up was switched from the blacklist to an affair on Redford's part (and Streisand ends the movie having his baby and then divorcing him.)

One last bit I love: Streisand and Redford in a competition as to who comes out of their trailer LAST. A competition. To solve it, each was given a walkie talkie to be called out at the SAME TIME. It was used once -- Streisand came out...Redford just threw his walkie talkie outside. Stars.

This book about the making of "The Way We Were" is really great on the detail. I've noted that I've been reading Rebello's book on Valley of the Dolls -- The Way We Were isn't THAT bad a movie, if not Psycho.

And it all circles back for me...TO 1973. A most exciting year at the movies, and in my young life and...I recall being shocked that I actually went to SEE a love story. But...I was in love, and she wanted to see it. Which -- considering how the movie ends -- was quite a risk on both our parts, to see a sad possible future.

Oh well, it was the way we were...

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

A movie channel on youtube that I recommend in another thread that mostly does 'Personal Top 10 of year x' lists occsionally does 'Top 20s' when the listmaker considers a year sufficiently bounteous. 1973 gets a 'Top 20':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UnNbhWbLiY&list=PLSk5ah8OzevtR6vnM1Gqo2jLJsiYUKLY4&index=24&pp=iAQB
as does (so far) 1971, 1979, 1981 (this was eye-opening for me because I'd always thought of 1981 as a down-year), 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988 (I think that the list-maker must have had his salad days in the '80s!), and 1995.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

1973 gets a 'Top 20':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UnNbhWbLiY&list=PLSk5ah8OzevtR6vnM1Gqo2jLJsiYUKLY4&index=24&pp=iAQB
as does (so far) 1971, 1979, 1981 (this was eye-opening for me because I'd always thought of 1981 as a down-year), 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988 (I think that the list-maker must have had his salad days in the '80s!), and 1995.

---

Yes, that's quite a heavy hit of the 80s, which I remember in general as a less "emotional" set of years than what we got in the early 70s...though 1973 generally lacked the incredible ultra-violence of 1971 into 1972 -- indeed, the surfeit of nostalgia movies(led by The Sting, American Graffiti, Paper Moon, and The Way We Were) rather felt like an "escape" from the blood, gore and rape(of women AND of men in Deliverance) of 71 and 72. Things "mellowed a bit" -- and yet...Dirty Harry 2(Magnum Force) was ultra-violent(a black pimp pours a can of Drano down his black hooker's throat) and The Exorcist...yecch.

I chose 1973 here for a few reasons:

50th Anniversary articles are appearing about that year, so now's the time.

It was a BIG year of emotional highs and lows in MY life, transitional youth years can be like that. And the movies and movie stars provided some stability(whatever was going on, I could rely on Eastwood and McQueen and even John Wayne as pals going way back. Not to mention Walter Matthau, that most astonishing of leading men for the decade.).

But, again, the sheer volume and variety of films in 1973. I thought it was amazing even then, I REALLY find it amazing now.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Looking over that list again, it perhaps doesn't make much sense TODAY as...all that great? all that exciting? For instance, both Westworld and Soylent Green -- from the dying shell of a studio that MGM was - aren't really GOOD films -- they look rather cheap and threadbare from the studio that in 1959 had given us something so polished, lush and shiny as North by Northwest. (With the 70's came "flat photography, Lalo Schifrin jazz scores, garish primary colors, clunky fashions, big hair"...those movies have a certain slapdash semi-documentarian style that is long gone to CGI.)

And if I were to show movies as disparate as Slither, Scarecrow and Blume in Love to modern young audiences, I expect they'd be bored and say "what's the big deal about THAT movie?" Indeed, those three movies would likely still be made to day...as indies. They all came from rather "arty" directors, as I recall.

But still, as 1973 went on -- and largely AFTER the summer (the summer movie season wouldn't really kick in until the 80's...Jaws and Star Wars were one-hit summer wonders) --- it was an amazing group of movies, hard to pick a favorite from that year. Both American Graffiti and The Way We Were were deeply moving -- ultimately, sad. And The Sting was simply a more complicated version, with bigger stars of...Charley Varrick(which came out first.) In both movies, the Mob AND the cops come after "smaller fish crooks" who outsmart them all using the same gimmick at the end. (Varrick and The Sting are rather companion pieces to me, but I like Varrick for the compact plausibility of the thing and the brilliant premise: Brain Walter Matthau outsmarts Brawn Joe Don Baker...and when it all pays off and we realize HOW Matthau does it...sublime.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Live and Let Die marked Roger Moore taking over the Bond franchise for the 70's after a false start with Connery(one more time, but not) in Diamonds are Forever. I thought at the time that Bond with Moore was an almost instantaneous switch of James Bond from being "adult, sexual, sadistic and serious" into something very jokey. (This commenced the "Bond as spoof of other hits" period -- Shaft with Live and Let Die, Enter the Dragon with The Man with the Golden Gun, Jaws with The Spy Who Loved Me and Star Wars with Moonraker.) I thought Live and Let Die was pretty lousy except for one important thing: Paul McCartney's oddly paced sudden power ballad theme song, all over the radio in 1973 and instant nostalgia when I hear it today. Note: how nostalgic at the end of 2021's "Licorice Pizza" , set in 1973, that our young lovers reunite under a marquee for Live and Let Die. ANOTHER reason I love that newer movie.

Here's how the movies can hurt sometimes: in the summer of 1973, I elected to go on a date while my male friends headed out to the drive-in to see Enter the Dragon. I reconnoitered with the guys a day later to hear how "you really missed it, man" -- this was the Greatest Movie Ever Made! Bruce Lee, the Kung Fu action, the climactic fight in the hall of mirrors....few things are worse than not seeing a movie everybody else has seen. I never got that Enter the Dragon experience THAT way, I had to see it on my own at a college screening a couple of years later and I STILL felt the sting of missing it with "the guys."

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

John Houseman's Professor Kingsfield is a great memory of 1973 -- that guy went back to Citizen Kane and worked on Saboteur with Hitchcock(whom 1973 critics said Houseman rather SOUNDED like in The Paper Chase) and he became a star in old age (though you can find him in one big scene -- with Martin Balsam -- in 1964's Seven Days in May where you can see all the same star power he exercised as Kingsfield.) The Paper Chase not only drove a new popularity for law school(even as the film presented it as a mental torture chamber), it rather "doubled" as a take on college life, too. Even if you couldn't go to law school(or didn't want to), the movie had a sense of academic life. And Kingsfield was every professor anybody ever had who drew a sharp desire to "break through the wall" and get to the man behind the genius(impossible, as star Timothy Bottoms finds out.)

---

Consider 1972. I was there, too, and I simply don't remember the full flow of movies all the way through as 1973 had. The Godfather opened in March and rather dominated the spring AND summer, right into the fall. Something weird about Deliverance: it hit LA and NYC in July.(NYC based Time and Newsweek reviewed in in July)..but it didn't reach the smaller city in which I lived until CHRISTMAS. Warners waited almost six months to send it out nationwide.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

One reason that Frenzy got a lot of "Hitchcock comeback ink" in the summer of 1972 is that -- with Deliverance only in two big cities -- there was almost nothing else of note in release. My "drive in crowd" dutifully saw such "meh" summer 1972 movies as Ben(a love story about a boy and his rat, with a Michael Jackson theme song -- based on a so-so horror movie called "Willard" from the year before); "Shaft's Big Score"(with a NXNW style helicopter chase in a movie that otherwise frittered away Richard Roundtree's great character), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid(a well reviewed but very boring Western) and some more weak MGM product(The Carey Treatment and The Wrath of God -- both OK, but not much.)

As I recall, other than Frenzy, the only two really good movies of the summer of 1972 included one "programmer"(Raquel Welch and a very good Robert Culp in the Western Hannie Caulder) and one "quiet classic" -- Sam Peckinpah's entirely non-violent rodeo movie "Junior Bonner," starring Steve McQueen with a perfectly cast Robert Preston as his father, Ida Lupino as his mother, and Joe Don Baker as his brother. One of my favorite movies, one of Peckinpah's best.

But nope, 1972 lacked whatever it was that 1973 had. Came Christmas, the big movies were The Getaway(McQueen and Peckinpah again, but this time with action violence) and first REAL modern disaster movie, The Poseidon Adventure. These lacked the classic stature of The Exorcist and The Sting one Christmas later.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

1971, 1979, 1981 (this was eye-opening for me because I'd always thought of 1981 as a down-year), 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988 (I think that the list-maker must have had his salad days in the '80s!), and 1995.

---

Looking at those listed years, I'm reminded of something I read in a book written by Time/Life film critic Richard Schickel. He quoted a study that found that the favorite movies "for life" of most people are movies they see when they are YOUNG...children, teenagers, college. Thereafter, people don't quite fall in love with movies as much.

Makes sense doesn't it? That's why for me, my faves are really from the 60's and 70s, and by 1979 even, the hormones were wearing off of youth. (I recall the late 70's as being haunted by the Spectre of Disco and a kind of pre-fab entertainment that I just didn't like -- gimme the blood and guts of 71/72 and the emotion of 1973. 1977 WAS the year it all changed. Not just Star Wars in the summer, but Close Encounters at Christmas and Saturday Night Fever too.

I figure whoever picked all those 80's years as great years -- were YOUNG in the 80s. I remember feeling just a bit too old to REALLY dig all the Spielberg/Lucas stuff....oh to have been a kid again when Raiders and Gremlins and The Goonies came out. Too late. (Also after one's youth is fully over...you go to work. Movies are seen against a backdrop of time available and the draining effect of "real life." And kids.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Some other great years:

1962: Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Manchurian Candidate(MY favorite -- a thriller of course, but with a lot going on, more political than any Hitchcock film), The Miracle Worker, The Music Man(a favorite musical of mine), the original Cape Fear(the better one), and hit movies for John Ford -- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance(a GREAT allegory) and Howard Hawks(Hatari -- aka Rio Bravo in Africa.) I had a "Hatari" comic book in 1962 and I duly recorded the director's name on the cover: "Howard Hawks Hatari." That movie had a Henry Mancini score -- he made a Hawks movie sound like a Blake Edwards movie. Or a Stanley Donen movie.

1967: If 1962 rather drew the curtain down on Old Hollywood(Peter Bogdanovich noted that the Bugs Bunny and Friends cartoons ended that year which was the signal)...1967 was the "New Hollywood year" led by The Graduate(sex) and Bonnie and Clyde(violence) but filled with other hits -- The Dirty Dozen and Point Blank for Lee Marvin, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and To Sir With Love for Sidney Poitier...and for this guy here, a stubborn commitment to Wait Until Dark (a big hit) as Number One, and to Hotel(not a hit, but well reviewed) as Number Two.

Film students from time immorial have been taught that 1939 was the greatest years for movies ever -- Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach and like 20 more at least.

I have to go with 1959 AND 1960 as greatest years, my two favorite movies are in each of them: North by Northwest(1959) and Psycho(1960.) But also Rio Bravo, Some Like It Hot, Anatomy of a Murder, Ben-Hur, The Apartment, Spartacus, and The Magnificent Seven.

...and it can go on and on.

But I keep coming back to 1973. And seeing as 2023 will be over soon enough...here's the last chance to salute that great emotional roller coaster year -- in life and at the movies -- at 50.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

1973 gets a 'Top 20':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UnNbhWbLiY&list=PLSk5ah8OzevtR6vnM1Gqo2jLJsiYUKLY4&index=24&pp=iAQB

---

Took a look. A heavily drinking young Brit(?) in heavy 2020 COVID lockdown giving it a go...I looked at some of his other "10 or 20 best of year" and there is this: he does a bang-up James Stewart impression so that when it comes time for him to opine on Vertigo, Anatomy of a Murder and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance...I swear its like ol' Jimmy come back to life.

I'm so MIXED on James Stewart. Maybe the fact that he always went by "Jimmy" on TV appearances(The Jack Benny Show, The Dean Martin Show), its like he had two personas. (Cary Grant -- that was it. One name.) I also found him quite non-sexy opposite Grace Kelly and Kim Novak and yet...when that British guy does his voice, one remembers the POWER of movie star voices in developing their star power. In voice alone, Jimmy Stewart(damn THAT name) was one of the greats.

To the Brit's 1973 list. He leads with the Richard Lester "Three Musketeers"(an odd mix of stars as the three -- Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay! -- plus Michael York as D'Artagnon.) Well, I saw "The Three Musketteers" in May of 1974 and I"m sure it was a 1974 release in America. The "sequel"(The Four Musketeers -- actually filmed at the same time; the actors sued for being paid once for two movies) I saw in 1975.

So it CAN'T make my 1973 list.

Most of mine are on his list, though he skipped Charley Varrick entirely. And I guess The Way We Were was too schmaltzy. And he kept American Graffitti OFF the list except as an "other movies of that year" throwaway(along with Walking Tall -- which I forgot about -- Joe Don Baker as a brutal GOOD GUY here became Joe Don Baker as a brutal BAD GUY in Charley Varrick.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

And oh the additional movies I forgot: Don't Look Now(a great one except -- Donald Sutherland's HAIR.) The Day of the Jackal -- as with Frenzy, Michael Caine was considered to play the villain first, but I think he didn't turn it down, he just couldn't fit it in. Edward Fox(brother of the more famous James at the time) got the role -- another "no star" thriller.

"Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man" says the title -- the year after Shaffer wrote both Frenzy and Sleuth for the screen, I guess he merited the credit.

Generally, I can't join in on foreign film discussions, but I DID go to the theater to see Francois Truffaut's Day for Night. It was ABOUT making movies, and I wanted to learn. Interesting: near the end of Hitchcock/Truffaut, Truffaut talks to Hitchcock about wanting to make a movie about making movies; Hitchcock says he wants to make a movie about FOOD...from gleaming fresh vegetables to dinner to sewage. Well Truffaut made Day for Night and Hitchcock made the food-and-waste ridden Frenzy(human BODIES as waste.)

Interesting: when Ingrid Bergman won the 1974 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Murder on the Orient Express, she protested FROM THE STAGE that it should have gone to Valentina Cortese for Day for Night -- Cortese was nominated in 1974 for a 1973 film?(And Cortese was in the audience to hear Bergman's apology.)

"Le Grand Bouffe" -- I ALMOST went to see that because it had two Hitchcock Topaz actors in it -- Michael Piccoli and Phillipe Noiret. (See? Hitchcock was as up to speed on Eurofilm with Topaz as he was on William Castle with Psycho -- always WITH the times.) Then I read the plot. No blankin' way!

I thought Badlands was 1974.

Other than that -- and withdrawing the foreign films about which I had no opinion -- the guy in question pretty much got all the right 1973 movies on his list.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

I remembered another 1973 one, though: Jesus Christ Superstar. I saw it. Norman Jewison directed it, he was a Big Cheese director coming off of Fiddler on the Roof(musical) and his Oscar for In the Heat of the Night years earlier. Whereas Fiddler hit, Jesus flopped. I had a friend who played the album incessantly , though. I learned all the songs.

Anyway, honestly, it was like 1973 movies went on and on and on...

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

Anyway, honestly, it was like 1973 movies went on and on and on..

This is the key in retrospect: 1939's highs may be a bit higher than 1973's best but the breadth and quality and basic interest of 1973's offerings amaze. This is particularly true when you bring in the great foreign language films of the year, but, sticking to English Language film, consider that films as watchable and enjoyable as Emperor of the North and Friends of Eddie Coyle and Last of Sheila and O Lucky Man haven't been mentioned so far.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Anyway, honestly, it was like 1973 movies went on and on and on..

---

This is the key in retrospect: 1939's highs may be a bit higher than 1973's best but the breadth and quality and basic interest of 1973's offerings amaze.

---

Its true. And, alas, the "1939 as the greatest year for movies" trope tends to find with every decade in the new century. Now 1973 seems long ago and far away. Though I guess 'The Exorcist" rather lives forever. William Friedkin dying this year(2023) has brought it back to the fore and a sequel is about to be released with Ellen Burstyn(the sole remaining cast member among the adults?)

---
This is particularly true when you bring in the great foreign language films of the year,

---

which you are welcome to reference, swanstep...I sort of leave those to you(though I DID see Day for Night at the theater in 1973...)

---

but, sticking to English Language film, consider that films as watchable and enjoyable as Emperor of the North and Friends of Eddie Coyle and Last of Sheila and O Lucky Man haven't been mentioned so far.

---

That's right -- not mentioned by me, because I was working off the top of head (and I'm rather proud I remembered as many as I did.)

I suppose I could go on the net and click for "list of films released in 1973" and get the full list without having made it a "memory test' for myself, but it was rather more exhilarating just to sit back and let the memory banks do the work. Heck, there are probably STILL some MORE 1973 films neither of us have mentioned.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

A thought: Of Emperor of the North, Friends of Eddie Coyle, Last of Shiela(co-written by Norman Bates, er Anthony Perkins) and O Lucky Man....I only saw Emperor of the North on release. It was actually a summer movie in 1973...again, the "summer movie season" was still years from becoming what it became in the 80s til COVID. (Even Barbenheimer happened in a summer still a little short on blockbusters.)

I caught The Last of Shiela on a pre-HBO Los Angeles movie channel called "Z Channel" about a year later. I only finally managed to see The Friends of Eddie Coyle a FEW YEARS AGO...on TCM(I liked it very much -- such a precursor to the modern crime thrillers of our time like The Sopranos and The Wire.)

And I have never seen O Lucky Man..though I have certainly read about it. (Note: its director Lindsay Anderson, was a British film critic before that and HATED Hitchocck movies.)

I recall seeing "Emperor of the North" -- a "man's movie" from Robert "Dirty Dozen" Aldrich about Lee Marvin's hobo fighting sadistic train boss Ernest Borgnine atop a train with a chain and an axe for weapons. THAT was an action movie circa 1973 -- two "old guys" in a grim Depression era setting, beating and chopping the hell out of each other atop a speeding locomotive in the woods. Saw it "with the guys" and I remember being amused that after the movie we went to Marie Callendar's pie shop for coffee and a piece of pie. Like..not a BAR? (Not old enough yet.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

That said, it is a sign of those times that I DID see the majority of 1973 movies at movie theaters. Tickets were cheap, I earned a little money, sometimes I went with parents and got it paid for...sometimes I waited for "second run double bills." But I was ABLE to see every release at the rate of one or two movies a week all through 1973. And BECAUSE I was such a movie buff, in the 70's...I just didn't watch much TV at all. A few episodes of Archie Bunker, a few Mary Tyler Moore's (our family went to the taping of two episodes in the 70's, somebody knew somebody). I only watched Columbo on a regular basis...and he was only once a month.

Came the 80's and working adulthood, TV came back into my life: Hill Street Blues, LA Law, St. Elsewhere. But in the 70's...nope...movies almost exclusively. TV "Movies of the Week" were clearly NOT movies (Spielberg broke the curse by filming Duel pretty much as a long form action sequence -- I stayed home to watch THAT, and I stayed home to watch Richard Boone as a 40's private eye in "Goodnight My Love" because I loved HIM. But these weren't movies.)

CONT

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

I thought Badlands was 1974.

It premiered - sensationally, as the last and potentially Mean-Streets-overthrowing film shown - at the NY film festival late in October 1973, and it got a rapturous review from Canby in the Times. The question is when did it get a proper release? Both the historical movie box office website The Numbers and IMDB say that Warners first put Badlands in limited release on March 24 1974. IMDb then says that that date was only for NYC, that it got its first LA cinema release on March 29 1974, and its first international release in Australia on April 1 1974.

The wikipedia page for Badlands elliptically summarizes its initial release through Warners as follows:

Warner Bros. purchased and distributed the film for just under $1 million. Warner Bros. initially previewed the film on a double bill with the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles, resulting in very negative audience response. The production team was forced to book the film into several other theaters, in locations such as Little Rock, Arkansas, to demonstrate that the film could make money.

In sum, despite being purchased and distributed by a Major Studio, and despite the fact that the full story of its release shenanigans remains to be told, Badlands evidently had a very eccentric, even fitful roll-out across 1974 and 1975. From that perspective, pegging it as a 1973 film is very misleading.

Pauline Kael wrote a famously negative review of Badlands on the occasion of its NYC March 1974 release. It's collected in her book Reeling. It's worth reading because it's *so* clear that she's reacting allergically to everything Malick's offering and proleptically to everything Malick's ever going to do later. She hates Badlands and even more the sort of people who are going to love it. Far out.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

In sum, despite being purchased and distributed by a Major Studio, and despite the fact that the full story of its release shenanigans remains to be told, Badlands evidently had a very eccentric, even fitful roll-out across 1974 and 1975. From that perspective, pegging it as a 1973 film is very misleading.

Pauline Kael wrote a famously negative review of Badlands on the occasion of its NYC March 1974 release.

---

Well...there you go. Movie distribution history is actually not terribly well documented, but it seems that with Jaws(1975) we began pretty much how movies have rolled out ever since
...opening everywhere in America on the same day(usually a Friday) became opening across the entire WORLD on the same day(hence these rapid billion dollar grosses.)

I've mentioned that Psycho opened in June on the East Coast of America and then in August on the West Coast(and probably the Midwest and everywhere else.) I've mentioned that Deliverance opened in July in NYC and LA...and Christmas everywhere else. Just a totally different world of movie distribution.

Of course, even modernly, we have the "Oscar December thing" of movies ONLY opening in NYC and LA in December and then everywhere else in January of the next year. The Oscars still nominate based on the December LA release.

----
It's collected in her book Reeling. It's worth reading because it's *so* clear that she's reacting allergically to everything Malick's offering and proleptically to everything Malick's ever going to do later.

---

Did she pan his later stuff? What was that one with Richard Gere?

---

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

She hates Badlands and even more the sort of people who are going to love it. Far out.

---

Kael was very aggravating with her "take" on the kind of idiots (in her mind) who would like movies she didn't like. As if predetermining the mindset of others. It looks like Tarantino did it too -- deciding in HIS mind that "people loved North by Northwest if they saw it when they were 22, but not realizing it is a mediocre movie." Thanks for reading my mind, QT ...WRONG. And being wrong on the age thing, too.

Or Woody Allen saying he would never want to make a hit like Jaws because it appeals to the lowest common denominator. Not so. But hey, Netflix is right now showing Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D(without the 3D) and Jaws 4 -- and all of them from 2 on? THOSE are "lowest common denominator" movies.

Rarely has one great movie spawned so many worthless spinoffs. I watched them all and the lesson is that it is a MIRACLE (credit to Spielberg, his small crew of writers, his fine actors and his wizardly editor Verna Fields) for making Jaws a film of gravitas and heft ALONG with the shark attack scenes. (The shark, seen for too long a stretch at a time, looks fake, fake and faker in each of the sequels. The victims seem to be attacked by climbing into the jaws of a paper mache shark statue and yelling -- like Bela Lugosi(Martin Landau) wrestling with a rubber octopus in "Ed Wood."

Of course, there was another director with some contempt for audiences. Hitchcock called the general public(if not HIS audience) "the moron masses" and some of that sentiment made its way into American Nazi Otto Kruger's speeches in Saboteur.

A biographer accompanied HItchcock on his filming of Family Plot in San Francisco in 1975 and watched HItchcock stuggle to direct the extras in church when the bishop is kidnapped at Grace Cathedral. Walking away after he was done, Hitch told the biographer, "That's what you call, directing morons."

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

I suppose what is interesting to me about whether Badlands was a 1973 movie or a 1974 movie, or why Valentia Cortese ended up nominated in 1975 for the Oscars of 1974 when Day for Night was released in America in 1973...or even why Marlon Brando was nominated for Last Tango in Paris for 1973 Oscars in 1974(and was not Kael's famous review of Last Tango published IN 1973?)...when I find it listed as a 1972 movie a LOT...is

WHY was there all this confusion about release dates for Oscar noms and other things at the time? Nobody had an accurate means of measurement.

And..why does this young hard drinking British(?) critic fellow call Badlands and The Three Musketeers among the best of 1973...when I saw them in 1974?

I suppose the answer is that a number of movies(back then) were released in England and Contintental Europe BEFORE getting American release. I will assume that The Three Musketeers, Last Tango in Paris and maybe Badlands fit that bill but then...why was Day for Night not nomniated until 1975 for Valentina?

It must be some kind of mystery...

CONT

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

Kael was very aggravating with her "take" on the kind of idiots (in her mind) who would like movies she didn't like. As if predetermining the mindset of others.

Yes, this is the syndrome I was detecting once again in Kael's Badlands review. It reads now as an importation into film criticism of a kind of 'no holds barred' fandom and anti-fandom/tribalism that's always been part of music appreciation when young and of music writing since about the same time as Kael. Film's never worked as a social-sorting mechanism in the same way that music has and does especially for the young, and here's Kael kind of writing as though it does or should. As for what Kael thought of later Malick films. Gilliat did the official review of Days of Heaven (1978) and loved it, but Kael wrote a capsule review which was collected in her 5001 Nights at the Movies (1985) book. Here's the crucial sentence or two from that:

The landscapes are vast and lonely, with the space in the images strained and the figures tilted; the characters are monosyllabic—near-mute. What is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily on us, but we're not quite sure what it is. The film is an empty Christmas tree: you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it.

So she didn't like it and, although Kael can't go into her full presumptuous diagnostic mode in a capsule, she can't hold herself back from insulting anyone ('dumb metaphors') who doesn't share her anti-enthusiasms.

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

he does a bang-up James Stewart impression

His Michael Caine is even better!

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

he does a bang-up James Stewart impression
His Michael Caine is even better!

---

YES...I caught up with that Caine impression when the guy was doing his best films of 1966 and counting Caine's Harry Palmer spy movie "Funeral in Berlin" among them.

Funny thing: I know I saw Funeral in Berlin as a kid, can't remember a thing about it, but looking at the clips here, it seems clearly of the "Torn Curtain" school of Berlin/East Germany cold war thriller. Except it looks like Caine's movie got "authentic location filming in Berlin" whereas Hitchcock never went there and paid for what he considered some "subpar foreign second unit footage" of East Germany that he intercut with California locations(for instance, the exterior for the farmhouse where Gromek dies was built in Camarillo, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.)

I'm reminded that Michael Caine(who is 90 now but seems MAYBE to have another movie or two in him) started out as a handsome heartthrob but then relied on his VOICE to maintain stardom into middle and old age(as in the Dark Knight films.) Like James Stewart, Caine's claim to fame may well have been MORE his voice than his looks.

Meanwhile, that British guy does James Stewart talking about Rear Window and -- its funny in a pornographic way. He has "good ol' Jimmy" specifiying the various sexual acts he sees being perormed in each window(NOT in the movie) and one "gets the picture": what if Jeff Jeffries REALLY saw intimate behavior and nudity through all those windows. Voyeurism with no excuses.

reply

[–] tsrts (308) 9 months ago

70s were an amazing time to be a movie fan.
Nowadays, not as amazing . . .
Funny, back then, they were just good movies.
Now, they are considered all-time classics.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Funny, back then, they were just good movies.
Now, they are considered all-time classics.

---

Time adds a certain longing for "back then" -- a nostalgia. As I note above, that WAS their time. You couldn't release many of those movies today and have the same impact. And many of them would be indies today.

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

Funny, back then, they were just good movies. Now, they are considered all-time classics.

Funny isn't it? I wasn't around in 1957 (to say the least) but I sometimes wonder how it *felt* because from 2023's perspective it looks like an utterly implausible run of Criterion Collection, timeless staples:

A Face In The Crowd, The Sweet Smell Of Success, Paths of Glory, 12 Angry Men, Wild Strawberries, Nights of Cabiria, Throne of Blood, The Cranes are Flying, Bridge on the River Kwai, The Seventh Seal

That's more like a Film School syllabus than an actual film year. But did the people of 1957 see it that way?

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Funny isn't it? I wasn't around in 1957 (to say the least) but I sometimes wonder how it *felt* because from 2023's perspective it looks like an utterly implausible run of Criterion Collection, timeless staples:

A Face In The Crowd, The Sweet Smell Of Success, Paths of Glory, 12 Angry Men, Wild Strawberries, Nights of Cabiria, Throne of Blood, The Cranes are Flying, Bridge on the River Kwai, The Seventh Seal

That's more like a Film School syllabus than an actual film year. But did the people of 1957 see it that way?

---

That's quite a list of classics, but honestly...1958 and 59 and 1960 and 61 and 62...I think so many movies were released IN GENERAL that you couldn't help but have a bunch of great ones every year -- and now they are classics and "old folks grousing about new times" aside...we are simply in a different WORLD of film now. I suppose I have to remind myself that once upon a time for me, "the 21st Century" and "2023" were such futuristic concepts that I didn't even THINK what movies would look like.

But also this: That 1957-1962 period(and later ones) were a time when many of the most popular hits were DRAMAS. SciFi and Horror were consigned to "B movies, not to be taken seriously" and even mysteries and...yep..Hitchcock movies were considered "less than."

But once it was determined that SciFi, horror, fantasy could generate BILLIONS...the movie industry changed. I've read that around the time of Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars.. a bunch of corporate types who had been ignoring the movie business SUDDENLY figured it out: we can make HUGE money with movies. And they took over the business. So B's became As, and a movie year with nothing but great dramas was..unimaginable.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

One movie year I'll always remember was 1984: the year(in my mind) that movies split into "summer blockbusters"(Ghostbusters, Temple of Doom, Star Trek III, Gremlins) and "Fall Oscar bait"(The Killing Fields, Amaedus, Places in the Heart.) The summer blockbusters have stayed in place(well, COVID knocked them down for awhile, but they are coming back) and the "fall Oscar bait" has taken on a lot of indiefilm and "movies most people haven't seen."

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

But once it was determined that SciFi, horror, fantasy could generate BILLIONS...the movie industry changed. I've read that around the time of Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars.. a bunch of corporate types who had been ignoring the movie business SUDDENLY figured it out: we can make HUGE money with movies. And they took over the business. So B's became As, and a movie year with nothing but great dramas was..unimaginable.

There were some great docs about Roger Corman back in the 2000s IIRC (which were instrumental I think in getting him an Honorary Oscar in 2009) and one of the turning points that Corman discusses both in footage from the time and from the perspective of the 2000s in those docs is 1977: the year of Star Wars and Close Encounters. Corman is amazed by those films and recognizes them as B-movies of the sort that he's had more or less to himself up till then, only done with enormous budgets and time and craft, and of course *they're made by* exactly the sorts of yahoo, film school dropouts that he's been giving starts to for decades. On the one hand Corman in 1977 sees that 'he's won'/'was right all along' about the sorts of films that a hell of a lot of people wanted to see and about the sort of people who go to most of the movies (teens and 20-somethings) and about the sort of people who should be making them, but on the other hand he fears for his own business because now his real quickie, B-movies are going to have to change, which may or may not be possible. And AIP only in fact lasted another couple of years. It was a hell of a shuddering change to the industry, both in Hollywood and in what we might call Off-Hollywood, post-1977.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

There were some great docs about Roger Corman back in the 2000s IIRC (which were instrumental I think in getting him an Honorary Oscar in 2009)

---

I recall in my readings over the years (possibly in the 80s and 90s) that efforts from all of Corman's famous "trainees"(including Scorsese, Coppola and Bogdanovich) to get him that honorary Oscar kept tailing because Corman had too many movies like "Attack of the Crab Monsters" on his resume and simply could't be taken seriously as a film artist(recall that Corman PRODUCED a lot of schlock but actually directed some OK movies.)

Surely we can add movies like "Attack of the Crab Monsters" to the inspiration for Hitchcock to make BOTH Psycho and The Birds...just in his imitiable stylel and, in the first case with a truly A + screenplay(which powered A acting.)

---

and one of the turning points that Corman discusses both in footage from the time and from the perspective of the 2000s in those docs is 1977: the year of Star Wars and Close Encounters.

----

Upthread I think I said that Star Wars dominated 1977 as Jaws dominated 1975, but that's not REALLY true. It was "Star Wars the summer and Close Encounters at Christmas" in 1977, though I think that Star Wars was a bigger earner and certainly spawned more of an empire. This was also "Lucas in the summer and Spielberg at Christmas," But still -- that was IT -- an "Old Hollywood" that had been rejecting the Star Wars script for years suddenly got it. They should have realized who the real fans of Star TREK were...they showed up for the new one. (I also remember seeing Shatner on a 1977 or 1978 talk show, being asked about Star Wars and saying in a quiet, deep, dismissive voice: "Oh, we could do better than THAT." Not really as the 1979 first Star Trek movie proved "creatively," but certainly as an empire grower, yes.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Corman is amazed by those films and recognizes them as B-movies of the sort that he's had more or less to himself up till then, only done with enormous budgets and time and craft, and of course *they're made by* exactly the sorts of yahoo, film school dropouts that he's been giving starts to for decades.

---

It occurs to me that neither George Lucas nor Spielberg "deigned" to toil for Roger Corman. Spielberg gravitated to Universal and series television, first, he saw where the REAL jobs were. (He directed one of the classy Columbos but also turned in episodes of the forgotten "The Psychiatrist" and "Name of the Game." Of course, the TV movie Duel REALLY put him on the map.

Lucas proved himself in film school and got THX made at Warners through Coppola's American Zoetrope(I think) and, frankly, ALSO used Universal (a "young filmmakers program" overseen by a fiery exec named Ned Tanen) to get American Graffiti made. Perhaps that is why both Star Wars and Close Encounters(the latter greenlighted because of Jaws) were "bigger than anything Corman ever really did.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

On the one hand Corman in 1977 sees that 'he's won'/'was right all along' about the sorts of films that a hell of a lot of people wanted to see and about the sort of people who go to most of the movies (teens and 20-somethings) and about the sort of people who should be making them, but on the other hand he fears for his own business because now his real quickie, B-movies are going to have to change, which may or may not be possible. And AIP only in fact lasted another couple of years.

---

An interesting fact. As Hollywood studios started making "B" movies -- with A budgets, casts and (sometimes) scripts, Corman couldn't keep up. Though I think he had a "cult" Star Wars/Mag Seven movie out to honor Star Wars a year or so after Star Wars - it has a good reputation and Robert Vaughn OF the original Mag 7 in its cast. And he gave Ron Howard a start as a director with a 1977(?) quickie called "Eat My Dust"(a Smokey and the Bandit clone?) starring Howard himself. But...no.

I'm reminded -- Psycho-wise that a DIFFERENT B-minus showman, William Castle, made that short series of movies (roughly around the same time Hitch was hitting with Vertigo and NXNW) that inspired Psycho(Macabre, The Tingler, and especially House on Haunted Hill), but a documentary on Castle demonstrated that his fan base was pretty much ...boys...children and pre-teen boys. And Castle would show up at local theaters surrounded by these boys and by boys AND adults dressed up like monsters attacking Castle as he hammed it up shamelessly

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

He was a "door to door, town to town producer," and his showmanship looks absolutely quaint -- almost childish itself -- and so, so reflective of a REAL innocent time in small town America(you can see those towns in the photos.) It remains amazing to me that America -- or at least its kids, its boys -- could be so innocent even as a various wars were killing off those boys one (WWII), two(Korea) three(Vietnam) in a most UN-innocent way once those boys got older.

But innocent they were in 1958 and 1959, and as sicko director John Waters says on a William Castle documentary, "once Psycho hit , William Castle's type of movie just wasn't scary enough anymore"(though not for lack of trying -- Castle made various Psycho variants straight through the 60s(Homcidal, Straight Jacket, I Saw What You Did, The Night Walker, Let's Kill Uncle") , and famously got a producers' credit on Rosemary's Baby because he owned the book.

So..William Castle(a niche horror player) and Roger Corman(all over the map -- horror, SciFi, biker flicks, LSD flicks, gangster flicks" -- had their time and it was ended once the studios took over the product.

Psycho was one of the steps there.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

It was a hell of a shuddering change to the industry, both in Hollywood and in what we might call Off-Hollywood, post-1977.

---

A famous one. Psycho is part of that small set of "landmark movies" and it had boy/teenager elements(the haunted house, the zombie mother, the swamp) but it really was seen as (its 1965 re-release poster said) "a masterpiece of adult horror." ADULT horror. And then Star Wars/Close Encounters took us back to ...childhood AND teens.

Recall that the success of Star Wars in 1977 helped kick start a dormant project -- Superman -- which came out the very next year as the Number One(or so) movie of the year -- and...here we are on THAT one, too, yes?

Its interesting looking back over the American movie business from roughly 1964 to 1977. It is probably fitting that Hitchcock, Wilder and Preminger had their biggest climactic "relevant hits" from 1959 through 1963...and were almost instantly passe after that. 1964 brought The Beatles and A Hard Days Night and an "international invasion" of American studios buying foreign made product.

What I remember now was the "dying out" of most American films in the late 60s. Suddenly passe producers were giving us not only those famous "Mastodon musicals" (of which I very much like Coppola's Finians Rainbow AND Hello Dolly AND Paint Your Wagon) but movies like Shoes of the Fisherman and Isadora.

Coppola and Bodgo and Friedkin SEEMED to be the New Wave(with films inspired by Eurofilm and in Bogdo's case, Old Hollywood films) but...they were short lived and "the kids took over."

Pretty amazing really.

And look at these 1980s titles: The Thing, The Fly, The Blob, Psycho II and III, Invaders from Mars...the 50's redux (with The Thing and The Fly pretty good movies..if not hits the first time out.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

But once it was determined that SciFi, horror, fantasy could generate BILLIONS...the movie industry changed. I've read that around the time of Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars.. a bunch of corporate types who had been ignoring the movie business SUDDENLY figured it out: we can make HUGE money with movies.

--

I should elaborate on this, because it took a lot of reading over a number of years for me to "get it."

The Hollywood studio model worked from roughly the 30s to the 70s, including the major hit from TV on this principle: a director like Hawks, Hitchcock, Wilder or Ford, would get a $250,000 fee(director, producer, or both) to make a movie, usually one a year. The movie, if successful, might make 4 million on a 2 million budget(I'm not sure the "3X" profit formual for advertising profits was in place.) If the movie hit, the studio was happy, if it flopped..no real harm done, and guys like Hitchcock and Wilder kept getting paid their dutiful $250,000(which made them rich enough) to do their jobs.

Moreover, HOW the movies were distributed wasn't focussed on that much on "high earning." Its a Mad Mad World, played a few theaters for a couple of years and then went out to a theater or drive in near you. It was a 1963 release, but I first saw it in 1967 and it had never really been taken OUT of release.

Movies made their money in dribbling smallish intakes there were certainly still giant box office hits(Ben-Hur) but MOST of the movies were just " made to formula." (Think of Dial M and To Catch a Thief in the Hitchcock canon.)

Consequently, the big corporations small movies as "small potatoes" profit wise and saw losing slates in 1968 and 1969 make the movie business look UNWORTHY of investing in. (Think Hitchcock's Topaz and Wilder's Sherlock Holmes.)

And then The Godfather hit. And The Exorcist. And The Sting. And Jaws. And Star Wars.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Hitchcock saw Jaws ("Ah yes, the big fish movie...it was very good" he reported when doing interviews for Family Plot) and his maid and her family waited all day in the Star Wars line and reported back to an amazed Hitch, who consequently wrote a letter to someone staking my claim above(paraphrased): "It used to be we made small hit movies on reasonable budgets. Now it seems that producers are willing to put $10 million on black on one spin of the roulette wheel and take their chances." I recall that line from Hitchcock -- "one spin on black of the roulette wheel." He was too old to take on THAT risk for studios. Leave it to Spielberg and Lucas -- who got VERY rich.

It seems to me that the sea change of 1977 is another reason that the output of 1973 is so amazing -- volume of movies, yes, but TYPES of movies and smalllish budgets and interesting scripts....there weren't too many years left where that could be DONE, and 1974, 1975, and 1976 weren't quite there for volume -- who knows why.

I recall 1974 as the "downer year" in which (as Lucas complained)"you came out of a movie feeling worse than when you went in). And he wasn't exaggerating -- Chinatown, Godfather II, The Conversation, Lenny..even Eastwood's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Reynolds The Longest Yard had "downer" elements at the end(Jeff Bridges dies in Lightfoot; Reynolds wins the game but is looking at life in prison for doing so, etc.) And the ubiqutious disaster movies -- spawned from The Poseidion Adventure of 1972...were largely downers too(LA is destroyed and the lead killed in Earthquake; innocents die in The Towering Inferno.) Mel Brooks hit big in downer 1974 with his two comedy hits(Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein) but never hit so big again.

1975 had Jaws(innocents die again, but a happy ending) and then the worm started to turn: Rocky in 1976. Star Wars in 1977.

1973 seemed a long time ago even IN 1977.l

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Because in that wonderful start-to-finish movie year of 1973, The Way We Were was one of the best experiences...a true EMOTIONAL rush (not all that far removed from the impact of American Graffiti on my raw young FEELINGS that year) even as it has a reputation as "almost a bad movie" -- not terribly well reviewed, and at times clumsy and hard to watch in its use of Barbra Streisand and her hard-punching screen persona.

--

I return to my "detour" to The Way We Were(very important to me in 1973 if less so now) because I learned of a surprising connection to an earlier film favorite of mine and its nice and narrow in scope:

In The Way We Were, actor Patrick O'Neal plays a movie director named "Bissinger," who, thanks to the chop-chop-chopping out of blacklist sequences seems to turn from Streisand's ally to Streisand's enemy in the course of two scenes.

O'Neal isn't in the movie much(he ended up largely on the cutting room floor) but the director he is playing(villainy aside) is based on John Huston, who less than a year after The Way We Were would play the villain in Chinatown and who, in 1970, directed Patrick O'Neal as the STAR of his vicious and mean Cold War thriller "The Kremlin Letter."

It seems that O'Neal decided to play Bissinger AS Huston given his up close and personal experience with Huston on The Kremlin Letter, and hence sometimes the REAL director of The Way We Were, Sydney Pollack, had to ask O'Neal to "give us less Huston, here, please." Pollack didn't want a straight John Huston impression.

BTW, O'Neal's failure as a leading man in The Kremlin Letter(in a role turned down by Beatty,McQueen and even James Coburn) is one reason he has such a small part in The Way We Were. That's showbiz. But O'Neal had a long career as a character guy.

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

Tying together various recent threads.... released this week in Oct 2023 is another sequel to 1973's biggest film, The Exorcist, this episode notable for being the first to return Ellen Burstyn and her character Chris MacNeil to the series. It also apparently brings back the Tubular Bells music and many other touches from the 1973 film, making this the most reverent of The Exorcist sequels.

The critics don't like it:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_exorcist_believer

and as of today it's featured on the first row of rottentomatoes front page with a 21% fresh splattered tomato rating:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/

Two other main horror films appear on that first row: the surprisingly well-reviewed tenth Saw film, Saw X (83% fresh accordng to critics), and The Birds (1963)'s re-release which gets a rousing 93% fresh from the critics. Most of the reviews generating that rating are quite old. One apparently relatively new and negative review is actually the notorious original 1963 pan from The New Yorker by Brendan Gill which called the film a 'sorry failure'. Quite a few 'big' reviewers in 1963 excoriated The Birds for its moments of lingering sadism which are real, to be fair, and still cause surprise in viewers today. The Birds still bites.

Anyhow, The Exorcist: Believer is written and directed by David Gordon Green who also did the recent surprisingly lucrative and successful Halloweens with Jamie Lee Curtis. I only watched the first of these and it was not ludicrous and sort of OK. I was happy that Jamie Lee got a big payday. The financial security those pictures afforded her probably allowed her to take chances on doing things like Everyone Everywhere All At Once almost for free.

Green has had a curious career. He began as an arthouse darling, Malick-imitator (1973 again) with George Washington (2000) and All The Real Girls (2003) but has since specialized in stoner comedies and horror reboots and sequels. Money?

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Tying together various recent threads.... released this week in Oct 2023 is another sequel to 1973's biggest film, The Exorcist, this episode notable for being the first to return Ellen Burstyn and her character Chris MacNeil to the series. It also apparently brings back the Tubular Bells music and many other touches from the 1973 film, making this the most reverent of The Exorcist sequels.

---

Yes. I saw the trailer at the theater and both the Tubular Bells reference and the presence of Ellen Burstyn(was she in ANY of the other sequels?) make it "the real deal" in terms of "bringing the feeling back."(Which neither Psycho II or Psycho III did because...no Bernard Herrmann. Tony Perkins and in II, Vera Miles, weirdly, not enough without the Herrmann music.)

The critics don't like it:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_exorcist_believer

---

So I see. I saw some review that found this Exorcist sequel lacking...against Psycho II. Oh, well.

---

and as of today it's featured on the first row of rottentomatoes front page with a 21% fresh splattered tomato rating:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/

Two other main horror films appear on that first row: the surprisingly well-reviewed tenth Saw film, Saw X (83% fresh accordng to critics), and The Birds (1963)'s re-release which gets a rousing 93% fresh from the critics.

---

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

I actually saw the first Saw in the theater, on release, and though it remains my contention that movies can't really scare me anymore...that one was sure gross and sadistic and the "phantom"(that weird masked guy on the tricycle) gave me chills enough. The twist at the end I had put in one of my own unsold scripts decades ago, I remember thinking: "Millions have the same idea...only the strong survive to get it on screen. I once had a "Purge"-like idea in the 80's or some such, but somebody got to THAT , too. I'm laughing at myself here -- again, just HAVING the idea isn't enough...you have to write the entire script, run the gauntlet of production companies and studios, get the movie made. All sorts of people who make successful movies with a key idea get sued all the time by OTHER people who had it. Not really sporting.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

and The Birds (1963)'s re-release which gets a rousing 93% fresh from the critics.

--

An Exorcist sequel and a Birds re-release are a nice "pair," driven I suppose by October as "the month of horror movie"(Cinemark also shows Psycho as its October classic in certain years.)

But we get this angle this year as well:

In 2023:

The Birds is 60 years old.
The Exorcist is 50 years old.

And those ten years in between saw the coming of ...wait for it...the R rating. So The Exorcist(which skirted an X/NC-17 before edits, as I recall) could be a lot more gross(if not gory) than The Birds.

---

Most of the reviews generating that rating are quite old. One apparently relatively new and negative review is actually the notorious original 1963 pan from The New Yorker by Brendan Gill which called the film a 'sorry failure'. Quite a few 'big' reviewers in 1963 excoriated The Birds for its moments of lingering sadism which are real, to be fair, and still cause surprise in viewers today. The Birds still bites.

---

I couldn't get my screen to magnify well enough to read either Brendan Gill's pan or that of Hitchcock Enemy Dwight MacDonald(whose review of The Birds opens: "The only item of interest with The Birds is that it is directed by Alfred Hitchcock" and goes on to hate, hate , hate it. ) I actually read MacDonald's Birds pan in a book. MacDonald was one of those "intellectual critics" who actually came off as dumb in both his pan of Psycho AND his pan of The Birds. With The Birds, it was "why don't the townspeople turn guns on the birds?" or "why not put the schoolkids in the basement"(what basement?) And the misremembered attack on Tippi Hedren "walking into a room and closing the door behind her" and getting attacked by birds (no, the birds KNOCKED her into it.)

But...hey...well...I'm not so sure that I MYSELF buy the scene where Tippi and Suzanne tell the kids to basically go out into the open as "bird bait" and run down the hill -- but maybe they felt they had no other options.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Indeed, I guess I'm a little bit WITH Mr. MacDonald about some of the "plot holes"(oh, no!) in The Birds that I do NOT think are in the better plotted (from Bloch's strong novel) Psycho.

Still, those plot holes -- "even in" The Birds -- are pretty minimal versus everything that WORKS in the movie: the truly historic special effects, the set-pieces, the spectacularly open ended ending (not a "Sopranos" non-ending, but one that had us wondering: is the world doomed?)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

Quite a few 'big' reviewers in 1963 excoriated The Birds for its moments of lingering sadism which are real, to be fair, and still cause surprise in viewers today.

---

And yet...I saw The Birds in 1963 as a child, with no real damage. As I've noted before, I kinda fantasized about WANTING the birds to chase my friends and me down a hill. It looked fun. Indeed, a key problem with The Birds versus Psycho is that in Psycho, the killer KILLS, every time, sudden death, no mercy, no hiding place. These "psycho birds" never actually KILL any of the kids they attack. And that IS "pulled punches" on Hitchocck's part. (12 years later, Spielberg WOULD kill a child in Jaws, to gut-wrenching effect.)

--

The Birds still bites.

---

It certainly seems to have taken on classic status ALONGSIDE Psycho as "Hitchcock sees the future" -- the slasher movie, the monster attack movie as A entertainment. As one later critic observed "Psycho and The Birds were a private teenage reserve...no parents allowed." Maybe?

Meanwhile even the greatest of OTHER Hitchocck thrillers -- Rebecca, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo , North by Northwest -- are rather like "mystery movies" -- for sedate older audiences.

Frenzy is all by its weird brutal lonesome. A horror movie that feels more like a drama-- it doesn't stand alongside Psycho, Halloween, Friday the 13th or Alien, but it IS horrific.

I recall this rave review of Frenzy in Newsweek setting my taste for it:

"It all seemed so simple. Starting with The Birds and sliding down to Topaz, Alfred Hitchcock had made a series of declining films not at the level of his greatest work, authored by age and irrelevance. But as usual, the old master has fooled us. Frenzy is among his very best."

I recall not only jumping for joy at a Hitchcock comeback hit -- but believing The Birds to be less than Frenzy. I can't say I feel that way today. Frenzy has faded; The Birds can play nationwide at Cinemark.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 9 months ago

And yet I think another reviewer singled out Frenzy as better than The Birds because it was cast with "seasoned British stage actors from the West End" whereas The Birds had Tippi Hedren -- an untrained nobody. Mean.

I think the dialogue is better in Frenzy than The Birds...but the dialogue doesn't much MATTER to The Birds once the attacks start in earnest.

I noticed that one of those Rotten Tomatoes reviews said that "The Birds" is more sophisticated than Psycho -- and I have read a few reviews that feel The Birds was BETTER than Psycho. Eh...nah...The Birds is BIGGER than Psycho, with more set-pieces, but Psycho was well nigh perfect (even with the shrink scene, John Gavin, and Arbogast's process fall.)

In my continuing quest to "set the stage" for Psycho in its 1967 Los Angeles local TV debut, I will note this as versus The Birds:

The local ABC affiliate had the money to promote Psycho not only in billboard all around LA(include outside a football stadium where thousands of fans filed past it) but in a two-page ad in both the national TV Guid and the local LA Times TV Guide AND in the LA Times newspaper on the day Psycho was broadcast. It was PHYSICALLY HUGE in the advertising -- a TV event. (Shown in the sweeps month of November and then in the other sweeps month of February.)

Meanwhile, The Birds on TV in January of 1968got no billboards, no two page ads, just a little quarter space ad in TV Guide("Birds of a feather flock together..to kill!") . But that ad played in TV Guides in all 50 states, and The Birds became the highest rated national broadcast of a movie, ever (for a few years.)

Now that Psycho and The Birds sit side by side on my DVD shelf -- "equally able to be pulled out for instant viewing" -- the 1967 weeks when Psycho was EVERYWHERE and The Birds was "barely there" in advertising -- I'll always remember those two movies THAT way.

No matter. I will try to see The Birds at Cinemark when it comes.

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 8 months ago

I actually read MacDonald's Birds pan in a book. MacDonald was one of those "intellectual critics" who actually came off as dumb in both his pan of Psycho AND his pan of The Birds.

I'm so used to ragging on that generation of snobby critics that imagine my surprise when I found one of them was the most revealing and helpful after my recent first, utterly dumbstruck viewing of The Great Gatsby (1974). Lots of critics had negative things to say about this consensus trainwreck but Stanley Kauffmann's observations were the ones that chimed most with my own. He alone moaned about the film's close-up abuse ("which is rather as if a composer worked steadily in loud chords"), the boringness of Sam Waterston's narrator voice (hell, he makes one appreciate the job Tobey Maguire did with his voice in 2013 version), the endless strange reworking of minor things from the book essentially to make them more portentous and less human or believable (why do that? the book's great, it zips along?), and so on. Kauffmann *was* needlessly nasty about Karen Black (calling her character a 'writhing gargoyle') when she was the least of the film's problems so so it's still impossible to like Kauffmann even when he's got the movie right ('A long, slow, sickening bore')!

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 9 months ago

All sorts of people who make successful movies with a key idea get sued all the time by OTHER people who had it. Not really sporting.

You're reminding me here of the Sorkin-authored Social Network line from Zuckerberg to the Winklevoss Twins, "If you'd invented Facebook, you would've invented Facebook". It occurs to me now that Sorkin probably knew of what he wrote from experience: scriptwriters like him who get their projects made must *constantly* deal with snide accusations of plagiarism from people who probably did have much the same basic idea once but who nonetheless didn't get their project made. Sorkin undoubtedly had that angle that allowed to see some of himself in Zuckerberg.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

All sorts of people who make successful movies with a key idea get sued all the time by OTHER people who had it. Not really sporting.
---

You're reminding me here of the Sorkin-authored Social Network line from Zuckerberg to the Winklevoss Twins, "If you'd invented Facebook, you would've invented Facebook".

---

And I'm reminded that in Sorkin's script for the political comedy-drama Charlie Wilson's War, Phillip Seymour Hoffman's CIA boss yelss at him: "If you were supposed to have the Helsinki job -- you'd be in the Helsinki job!"

Oops. Sorkin plagarized from himself.

---

It occurs to me now that Sorkin probably knew of what he wrote from experience: scriptwriters like him who get their projects made must *constantly* deal with snide accusations of plagiarism from people who probably did have much the same basic idea once but who nonetheless didn't get their project made. Sorkin undoubtedly had that angle that allowed to see some of himself in Zuckerberg.

---

I recall the "lousy but rich" screenwriter Joe Esterhaz writing one of those "how to be a screenwriter" books (and his introduction was correct but ironic: "Don't you think you should learn screenwriting from a successful screenwriter who wrote some big hits?" (Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge, mainly.) Fair enough Joe. Anyway, Joe had this method for protecting your work from plagarists in lawsuits but he then wrote "and this STILL won't guarantee that you fend them off, but it helps."(Something about copyrighting a screenplay, time marking it, and keeping it in a vault to prove when you wrote it.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

I've exposed myself here just a bit as a "failed screenwriter"(one of the ultimate epithets hurled by producers and successful screenwriters -- usually at CRITICS who try to write screenplays, and I'll say BOTH (1) Guilty as charged and (2) but I never really tried hard to BE a screenwriter -- that is to "do the work" of pitching and writing multiple screenplays, etc. I tried a little, had a couple of meetings and a few rejection letters and...quit and went on to other education and a "regular" career.

That said: I wrote a few screenplays in my college years, and one of them won a national award and got me an agent meeting, and some representation. So I least I was THAT legitimate.

Later(in the 80s)I had a friend at a major studio who encouraged me to try again, so I did but...no dice. The end.

I have great respect for the screenwriters who actually CAN write great scripts -- QT is at the top of my list, I like Sorkin's style even though it is rather fake and transparent sometimes(he likes to write yelling arguments, he had his character tell us about their father's careers, etc.) Woody Allen was great in his greatest period, I don't much see him now.

But actually two things are REALLY hard about trying to write an original screenplay -- (1) Coming up with an ORIGINAL idea(which, frankly, Hollywood doesn't do all that often -- the cop buddy pictures of the 80s pretty much had the same plot )and (2) indeed, writing GOOD dialogue. As Stephen King pointed out, the "writing" on seventies cop shows was usually "the equivalent of lobbing cases of beer onto a loading truck" -- just doing a job.

But the hardest part of all: fighting through everything to actually get the screenplay sold and maybe made. Tarantino took YEARS to get that first break, as I recall.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

With Hitchcock, we seem to have these great one hit wonder scripts from Joseph Stefano(Psycho) and Ernest Lehman(North by Northwest -- where I have particular regard for the intelligence and elegance of James Mason's speeches.) Screenwriter John Michael Hayes was the ONLY Hitchcock scribe to write four in a row: Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. But they all have damn good dialogue, that's for sure. (Hitchcock forced another writer on Man Who Knew Too Much -- credit only -- and Hayes quit.)

Anthony Shaffer got the "Frenzy" assignment just as he was considered (said Shaffer with a laugh) "the second coming" from writing the play Sleuth. (Even as a teenager, when I read that Shaffer was going to write Frenzy , I figured -- "then this movie could be GOOD.") And yet even Shaffer didn't last too long -- The Wicker Man(cult classic), Death on the Nile, a few other Agatha Christie movies.

Raymond Chandler's name was on the credits for the Strangers on a Train script -- but evidently he wrote none of it, and had been fired after insulting HItchcock and the project. John Steinbeck's name is on the Lifeboat script -- I think he at least wrote a treatment.

And so on and so forth. The one shocker in the bunch, I"ve always felt is how subpar Evan Hunter's script was for The Birds. He was hot under his own name and as "Ed McBain" writing cop mysteries -- what went wrong?

Anyway, I will take some lumps as a "failed screenwriter" but on the other hand, I got an award, got an agent, had some meetings..."I've got that going for me, which is nice."..and, upon early failures, immediately switched to a "real job" type career like most everybody else.

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 8 months ago

I have great respect for the screenwriters who actually CAN write great scripts -- QT is at the top of my list, I like Sorkin's style even though it is rather fake and transparent sometimes

As you know, ecarle, I have a lot of time for those screenwriters who seem to be able to produce incredibly diverse scripts.... but it's the second group of screenwriters to which QT and Sorkin belong - writers who have incredibly strong authorial voices and who have their specific hobbyhorses that they always pursue and even ride into the ground - that are of the most interest. Preston Sturges, Paddy Chayefsky, Towne, Charlie Kaufman, the Coens. With all of these people the dialogue and basic angle/ideas/world-building are so distinctive and so evidently projections of a single personality that the script amounts to a full pre-direction (often up to and including casting). People like that don't come along that often.

I've been thinking about another of this second, rarer type of screen-writer a lot recently: Dennis Potter. Potter mainly worked in UK TV. His peak show was a six-parter called The Singing Detective (1986). That show starred Michael Gambon who's more famous now as the second Dumbledore from Harry Potter. Gambon recently died and that's sent a lot of us scrambling back to The Singing Detective and Potter . TSD was screened on PBS in the US at the time and caused a bit of stir, but ultimately Potter never quite broke through in the US. Anyhow if you want to get a feel for Potter, youtube has some key treasures, albeit the picture quality is ok at best, poor at worst. The Singing Detective is there:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFSU8nMbq7Q1iW3u6flPnpsj3aSZc52xC

and probably 30+ hours of other series and one-off tv-plays (a big form in the '60s and '70s on UK TV) are here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmRu2axUu2LFVlpd8eabc2Zn9NKoUTs9H

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

As you know, ecarle, I have a lot of time for those screenwriters who seem to be able to produce incredibly diverse scripts.... but it's the second group of screenwriters to which QT and Sorkin belong - writers who have incredibly strong authorial voices and who have their specific hobbyhorses that they always pursue and even ride into the ground - that are of the most interest.

---

Well, QT -- like Woody Allen and in a less identifiable mode, The Coens -- is a "writer-director" in the main. It remains amazing that we have a few movies (True Romance, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk Til Dawn) where QT only wrote the script(and I think he has disowned Killers)...but he couldn't get that director's chair for awhile.

QT also rather amazingly -- from KIll Bill on -- established himself as " a writer who could direct great action sequences." The fight vs the Crazy 88s in Kill Bill, the final car chase in Death Proof(an homage, in locale, to an old Robert Forster movie), the shoot out in Django Unchained(in which blood spurts like purple Hawaiian Punch) .. QT proved himself as much in the look of his films as their inimitable dialogue.

---

Preston Sturges, Paddy Chayefsky, Towne, Charlie Kaufman, the Coens. With all of these people the dialogue and basic angle/ideas/world-building are so distinctive and so evidently projections of a single personality that the script amounts to a full pre-direction (often up to and including casting). People like that don't come along that often.

--

True. Sturges was a writer-director. Billy Wilder was a writer-director(though always with a collaborator to help him with his English.)

---

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

I gave it some thought and "working backwards" from favorite movies to their scripts, I came up with these exemplary screenwriters:

David Mamet: a playwright to start, his script for The Untouchables is filled with great lines(mainly for Connery) and his script for The Verdict is "solid narrative." The film of his play Glengarry Glen Ross was a great MOVIE, with dialogue like action gunfire -- and both Alec Baldwin and his classic opening scene were written directly for the film.

Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland: Apart from each other, nothing much on their resumes. But they adapted the great James Ellroy's LA Confidential and won an Oscar...delivered by Billy Wilder's muses Lemmon and Matthau. What's great is how they condensed the novel, moved things around and "invented something"(an unseen character named Rollo Tomasi) and created a separate great written work.

Peter Stone: He wrote two great sixties thrillers -- Charade and Mirage -- and took his name off a third: Arabesque. I always wondered why he didn't get to write for Hitchocck -- they were both berthed at Universal in the 60s. Walter Matthau was support in Charade and Mirage, but in the 70's, he emerged as the STAR of another great Peter Stone script: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, as gritty as Charade was smooth.

"Whoever those guys were who wrote Dirty Harry, Big Jake and Charley Varrick." Harry and Charley were directed by Don Siegel, Big Jake was a John Wayne Western that FELT like it was directed by Siegel. But all three scripts shared tough one-liners and speeches and I'd have to look up the screenwriters used on all three films to guess who wrote what.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

Paddy Chayefsky: You mentioned him above, swanstep, but I'd like to select him out "special." Here is a guy who wrote two-matching Oscar winning scripts (The Hospital and Network) that are a matched pair of intellectual speechifying -- and yet he made his name way back in 1955 for the humorous/sad realism of "Marty." Its like he was two different authors. The Hospital/Network guy surfaced early in 1964's "The Americanization of Emily" with Julie Andrews and James Garner..in which Garner reads Paddy's long overbearing speeches as Andrews just has to stand there looking embarrassed. Garner did say that The Americanization of Emily was his own best film -- and the best film ever made. Well, Mr. Garner -- tell us how you REALLY feel.

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

I've been thinking about another of this second, rarer type of screen-writer a lot recently: Dennis Potter. Potter mainly worked in UK TV. His peak show was a six-parter called The Singing Detective (1986). That show starred Michael Gambon who's more famous now as the second Dumbledore from Harry Potter. Gambon recently died and that's sent a lot of us scrambling back to The Singing Detective and Potter .

---

I"ve heard of Dennis Potter -- and I had a friend who loved The Singing Detective -- but I have not viewed that work, or even some of it. Maybe now.

Interesting: Michael Gambon shared Dennis Potter and Harry Potter. I must admit as various famous actors pass and have "Harry Potter" listed as their big movie appearance, with so many of them I remember them for something ELSE. Alan Rickman(Die Hard.) Richard Harris. That big guy. And now Michael Gambon -- I recall him as quite the frontier Town Boss -- murderous, self-sure, fighting to the end -- in Kevin Costner's Open Range (with Robert Duvall pairing up wonderfully with Costner.)

reply

[–] SandyR (7632) 8 months ago

The 'interesting movie every week' was true until the early 1990s.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

The 'interesting movie every week' was true until the early 1990s

---

That's true . And depending on our ages, some of us may feel more warmly to the 60s or to the 80s than to the 70's.

I selected 1973 both for its relevance to my younger days AND the fact that I honestly didn't feel(even at the time) that 1972 and 1974 on either side of it had quite the same bountiful number of films.

With the 80s, I recall how it felt like each summer had a "new blockbuster a week." 1989 had Batman, an Indy, a Bond, a Star Trek....

...and that also puts 1973 in relief. There was a TONE to all those 1973 releases -- very few sequels(I think Summer of 42 got one), nothing but original stories, many of them dramas that would be indiefilms today. But a lot of HEART to the lot ot fhem. American Graffiti, The Way We Were, Paper Moon even The Paper Chase felt emotional. Even The Exorcist ended sadly(the exorcists die) but happily(the girl is saved.) Emotion there, too. And everybody felt great at the end of The Sting. Came 1974 -- a bunch of bummer endings.

reply

[–] SandyR (7632) 8 months ago

The 70s were the height of pop culture in the U.S., as far as I'm concerned. Everything gradually became less and less original, less vital, less relevant to the human experience, as the decades progressed. I would say for popcorn movies, few years compare to 1981.

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 8 months ago

@SandyR. In case you haven't seen it, the following tribute to '70s pop culture is worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bty-cKqf9Y
The same channel has done tributes for every every decade since the '50s but the '70s tribute works better than the others, seems to have better material overall to work with.

reply

[–] SandyR (7632) 8 months ago

Thanks, I'll take a look.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

The 70s were the height of pop culture in the U.S., as far as I'm concerned. Everything gradually became less and less original, less vital, less relevant to the human experience, as the decades progressed.

---

I try to fight the "it was better in MY day" approach to movies and music, but it sure was different and there is a fair amount of evidence that both movies and music were changed by something fairly specific that came in around the late seventies: much more corporate management of the businesses, and (with movies) a switch to worldwide distribution that gradully bled the "American movie" of its American-centric qualities.

Take rock music. I recall reading an article somewhere that MTV(which started in 1981) was very much a CORPORATE endeavor(with its constantly hawking "VJs") and that corporate control of artists really kicked in. And yet, hey, we got Springsteen and Michael Jackson and Madonna and Prince -- corporations couldn't mess with THEM.

On the other hand, who is our biggest(and I mean BIGGEST) artist right now? Taylor Swift. And rap has continued for decades. Not so much corporate as "never going away." Rolling Stone published Jann Wenner(who no longer really works there) has as much as conceded -- with no anger -- that "rock and roll is essentially dead and over" -- an era from the past. (Which started big in the 50's and 60s when Hitchcock reigned, ya know?)

---

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

I would say for popcorn movies, few years compare to 1981.

---

Well, the 80's were underway. In that summer, we got Superman II(shorn of the origin tale, it was quicker and more action packed and funny) AND that new guy Indiana Jones, PLUS a James Bond(Roger Moore in the stripped down For Your Eyes Only with its sultry summer radio theme song by Sheena Easton) AND the surprise comedy hit Arthur(with ITS charming summer radio theme song)...

but hey...how about the summer of 1982 the next year. ET above all, and The Road Warrior and Rocky III and Star Trek II(saving the dull memory of Star Trek 1 with a lot more conflict and action, and...KHAN!) And The Thing, and Conan the Barbarian(here comes Arnold!).

Might as well continue on to the summer of 1983, which not only led off with the "final" hah Star Wars(Return of the Jedi) but snuck in a modest hit called..Psycho II (a nod to how the 80's would cannibalize the movies and TV shows of DECADES before.)

CONT

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 8 months ago

There was a TONE to all those 1973 releases -- very few sequels(I think Summer of 42 got one), nothing but original stories, many of them dramas that would be indiefilms today. But a lot of HEART to the lot of them.

It's absolutely true that there were bunches of movies from 1973 that had a very rich and detailed human scale: Mean Streets, Scarecrow, Charley Varrick, Long Goodbye, Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Last Detail, Emperor of the North, Badlands *feel* like they're from the same post-Five Easy Pieces moment in movie history. Ditto the great 1973 UK pseudo-horrors: O Lucky Man, Wicker Man, Don't Look Now - so different but feel deeply alike in the way they push boundaries. Ditto the European biggies from 1973: Scenes from a Marriage, Spirit of the Beehive, Amarcord, Day for Night, The Mother and The Whore, Turkish Delight - they're mostly made by people who did great stuff in the '60s and who were now trying to do something new albeit with a more popular touch than before, so they couldn't have been made at any other time either. And the ones that aren't that way, Spirit of the Beehive (my fave film from 1973 and one of the most beautiful films ever made) and Turkish Delight have movie-brat-ness of different sorts written all over them. Beehive is all classical like Paper Moon and Turkish Delight has the crazy energy of Mean Streets.

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

There was a TONE to all those 1973 releases -- very few sequels(I think Summer of 42 got one)

---

It now occurs to me that 1973 got a big hit in Dirty Harry 2(Magnum Force) and had a James Bond movie(Live and Let Die) -- Bond has been nothing but sequels for 60 years.

--

, nothing but original stories, many of them dramas that would be indiefilms today. But a lot of HEART to the lot of them.

---
It's absolutely true that there were bunches of movies from 1973 that had a very rich and detailed human scale: Mean Streets, Scarecrow, Charley Varrick, Long Goodbye, Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Last Detail, Emperor of the North, Badlands *feel* like they're from the same post-Five Easy Pieces moment in movie history.

---

I suppose Five Easy Pieces was a true "gateway movie" to the 70's in its gritty, semi-documentary look and it helped make Jack Nicholson "the first hippie movie star"(really, he got that. Or at least "the first countercultural movie star." ) I find that movie a bit too arty and inaccessible -- the movies that followed it actually had more heart and humor (and I STILL think Nicholson's rage at a tired diner waitress was as rude and elitist as it was funny.)

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

Ditto the great 1973 UK pseudo-horrors: O Lucky Man, Wicker Man, Don't Look Now - so different but feel deeply alike in the way they push boundaries.

---

For we in America, "British movies" are always their own world and genre, I suppose. Unlike other "foreign films," the language is understandable(well, most of the time, some of the Cockney could use subtitles) but it is its own world and in the 70s, its approach to horror was most specific. The titles you've written above are "high brow" but I think you could add Vincent Price's lowbrow "Theatre of Blood" in there, and from the year before...I daresay Hitchcock's Frenzy is more of a British film than an American one(THAT gave it special cachet at the end of Hitchcock's career, too.)

--- Ditto the European biggies from 1973: Scenes from a Marriage, Spirit of the Beehive, Amarcord, Day for Night, The Mother and The Whore, Turkish Delight -

---

And here I yield to you, swanstep -- you are our "foreign film specialist"(or shall I say international film -- I know you aren't from America). To my credit, while I only SAW Day for Night(because: Hitchcock/Truffaut), I've READ of all those other titles. I guess that's the limits of my foreign film buffery.

---

they're mostly made by people who did great stuff in the '60s and who were now trying to do something new albeit with a more popular touch than before, so they couldn't have been made at any other time either.

---

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

An interesting idea: The "R" and X coming to American in 1968 gave American fillmmakers freedoms in movie that European films had had through the SIXTIES. But maybe even the 70's opened up for foreign film censorship, too? At least, the 70's as a worldwide "thing" drove fillmakers to "move forward yet ahead."

---

And the ones that aren't that way, Spirit of the Beehive (my fave film from 1973 and one of the most beautiful films ever made)

---

There you go...

---

and Turkish Delight have movie-brat-ness of different sorts written all over them.

--

From my readings, I recall Turkish Delight featuring some body fluids I didn't want to see on screen. But hell -- we had The Exorcist. Note in passing: as a "horror memory," Mother coming out at Arbogast and ALL the elements of the shot, the actors, the music -- classic. As a "horror memory," all that green soup roaring out of Regan's mouth and onto Father Karras's face? Just GROSS, man...

---
Beehive is all classical like Paper Moon and Turkish Delight has the crazy energy of Mean Streets.

--

Interesting comparisons. Likely not intentional, but "in the air" as filmmaking did its 1970s thing.

--

A conundrum on "foreign/international film": I recall reading an essay -- maybe in the last 10 years -- about how the emphasis on American studio films playing to a worldwide audience at once made for billion dollar grosses and "dumbed down films" -- the writer actually used this phrase: "A worldwide audience of mouth breathers" -- as opposed to the more sophisticated viewers at art houses, I guess.

Led me to wonder: did we LOSE international filmmakers on the level of the 'famous first bunch" that included Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman,Satijat(sp?) Ray -- people I read about in a book of interviews I got in 1970 that ALSO had Hitchocck in it. (Hitchcock in a promotional film around then noted, "I am honored to be included with some noteable directors whose names I cannot pronounce.")

CONT

reply

[–] roger1 (2683) 8 months ago

Anyway, i GUESS we have filmakers from all over the world in fully supply at the levels of the 60s and 70s but...am I right?

Perhaps an emphasis of different nations now: South Korea is sure on the map. I still don't think it was quite fair for Parasite to win BOTH Best Foreign Film and Best Picture at the 2019 Oscars, but...it surely reflected the rise of international film in the 21st Century.

Anyway, I wonder about this. Are films foreign to American studios still the big deal they were? Swanstep, maybe?

reply

[–] swanstep (2650) 8 months ago

Are films foreign to American studios still the big deal they were?

The place of film in overall cultural ecosystems has declined worldwide on all sorts of fronts I think. One of those is that there isn't quite room for superstar-smartiepants directors to become must-sees for certain classes of people. I mean, Dick Cavett would have people like Godard and Bergman on his show. They were names that lots of Americans could be intrigued by, and lots of people generally could be intrigued. Comparable smarties today (from now elder states-people like Haneke and Almodovar and Von Trier and Carax and Skolemowski to Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan Wook from S Korea, and many others) don't have quite the same profile now because Film itself isn't at the center of culture anymore.

But there are also complex forces at work that are much more general than film. For one thing past media generally is much more accessible than it used to be. And that may not be a good thing. The following piece from Ted Gioia last year got people wondering about the music industry:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/
and similar phenomena may be undermining our ability to collectively embrace and nurture new top-tier talent in film too.

reply